A dilemma for E-Learning Developers

Many surveys have shown that adult learners that have daily access to computers enjoy and find more effective E-learning segments delivered in small increments. Our own informal polls indicate that under 15 minutes is an ideal delivery portion. A combination of bite sized chunks of knowledge that fit neatly into small segments of the learner's day seems best from both a learning retention point of view and a learner's positive attitude to the process.

We work very hard with subject matter experts to compress delivered segments into usable smaller segments.

Regulators in professions that require continuous education for their members (this includes medical professions, real estate professionals and many others) seem to work against this principle though. Their measure of "credits" is based on how long a delivered lesson is -- tending to push developers to make segments longer rather than shorter. Similar content delivered in longer times becomes the driving force. So much so that some regulators not only drive lessons to be longer but mandate "seat time" forcing developers to go to ridiculous methods to force learners to sit in front of the computer for the full time.

None of this helps the purpose of keeping individuals up to date in their profession. It wastes their time, creates a situation where content is purposely stretched to fill out the required credit hours and is generally all round inefficient.

Surely there is a better way.

In the Cloud

Courses by Wire's webserver, this weblog and soon to be introduced services are now cloud based (other than increased reliability, scalability though the change is transparent) but I thought it might be of interest.

Merry Christmas/Happy Holidays to all

Clever Adwords advertisement celebrating 10 years

Clever Adwords video -- seemingly created on the fly to be individual for each Adwords customer. This is ours. You have to watch it all the way through it seems -- no skipping ahead.

Endorsement for small increments of learning!

Recently, one of our incremental courses (less than 10 minutes in length) was being reviewed by a small committee of executives. Not only were they totally attentive to the content, but they applauded when it was over! Now that's an endorsement!

Fotalia man

We use stock photos a fair amount in our ELearning productions. Our favourite stock photo site is Fotalia. We keep using pictures of him and seeing the same model appear all the time (not just in our productions but in lots of sites around the internet) - http.www.zennioptical.com for instance.

A running joke is that we have now started calling him Fotalia man.

If you build it they may not come

One of the biggest problems with eLearning is the uptake. No matter how good your eLearning is if users don't use the lessons the project will be a failure. Persistence and marketing is the way to "sell" the eLearning whether it is an internal project or not.

A strategy of pushing small bits of eLearning that can be taken in the morning before the work day officially starts, during breaks or other down times, on the road, in the airport will increase uptake, retention and maximize the value of Elearning development. Anywhere, anytime, anyplace.

Incremental Learning

Who has time anymore to spend a full day or more at a training seminar? Even if you do, how much of that full day course do you remember when you get back to your desk?

People are even more time-constrained than ever – or at least they have the perception of wanting “instant gratification” when it comes to online usage. We routinely expect faster boot-up times and faster download times. Lengthy emails have been replaced by “tweets”. Laptops are being superseded by PDAs – like Blackberrys, iPads, iPhones, etc.

Even a lot of e-learning courses are 1-hour or more in length. Wouldn't it be better to learn in smaller increments?

Small increments of learning - say 5, 10 or 15 minutes - can more easily fit into your daily schedule, plus the learner is more likely to retain the knowledge.

Doesn't it make sense to only take "minutes to learn" something new every day!

Time and costs for eLearning development

Brian Chapman of the Chapman Alliance has published a study on the costs of eLearning development. He provides a grid of simple to complex and more media rich interactive content and times from 22 to 716 hours of development per hour of finished eLearning with average costs of $5000 to $50000 dollars per hour.